World Progress Now is proud to announce the launch of our first campaign to #gowithoutplastic. We are specifically targeting single use plastic products. This means plastic grocery bags, water bottles, soda bottles, shampoo bottles, and all other plastics that are thrown away.
Tourism lends itself to convenience. Many travelers don’t want to be bothered by looking for water or using their own reusable bags. This, however, is not responsible tourism. Because one’s use of such items impacts the local environment, convenience is no longer convenient. If travelers from around the world wish to continue to use plastic when they travel to Bali or greater Indonesia, then eventually those locations will have so much trash associated with them that tourism itself will start to decline. This creates an eventual economic problem for the locals associated with these tourist destinations.
World Progress Now is a pro-tourism organization which promotes responsible and sustainable travel. We understand the benefits of tourism to local economies. We understand that tourism can help lift individuals out of poverty, but we also understand that tourism has its drawbacks. Mitigating and even reversing these drawbacks is the goal. In fact one of the biggest reasons for the creation of World Progress Now as an organization was because too many tourists return from their vacations and point out how dirty or full of litter other countries were. “They just don’t clean up their trash, there was plastic everywhere,” one tourist said to me last year at a Christmas party.
The fact is that tourism itself demands sanitation, which equals plastic packaging. That plastic packaging has no place to go after its use because most countries do not have the infrastructure to deal with excess waste in terms of pickup, landfills, and recycling. Long story short, they have no place to put the waste caused by tourism itself. This has been the way of the world for some time and now individuals need to take some responsibility. It takes time to build awareness and infrastructure. Our goal is to build that infrastructure worldwide to avoid waste.
We want your comments and input on how you move around without plastic. What are your tips on how to survive without plastic water bottles and other plastic products? How can we as tourists make a difference in the natural world we love to explore? Please send us your pictures and comments so that we may share your story of being a Responsible Tourist. Join us on our awareness campaign and share with social media.